Latin Mass Society

Chairman's Blog

27/11/2021 - 10:00

Response to Fr Ruff on Liturgical Polarisation

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Mass for Vladimir Ashkenazy and family at Maiden Lane last week.
Cross-posted from Rorate Caeli.
Fr Anthony Ruff at the Pray, Tell blog tells us that the basic picture, in the debate about liturgy, is that

either one supports Vatican II and the reformed liturgy to the exclusion of the preconciliar liturgy, or one shows greater or lesser openness to the preconciliar liturgy, which seems to be equated with opposition to Vatican II.

He does not pause to explain what "opposition to Vatican II" might mean, but admits that not everyone falls into these two strictly opposed camps:

people who don’t fit neatly in either camp... [who] don’t see the preconciliar liturgy as particularly bad or harmful and don’t mind attending it at times.

Fr Ruff would like such people to realise

that the preconciliar liturgy is incompatible with the large advances made by the Second Vatican Council in ecclesiology and liturgical theology and inculturation and all the rest.

He gives the impression that he would like to see the Church become two armed camps snarling at each other from their trenches, with barbed wire, if not clouds of poison gas, marking out no-man’s land. But as for what these Vatican II "advances" might be, Fr Ruff does not say.


Fr Ruff blames Pope Benedict for “pushing people into two opposing liturgical camps”, but seems eager to do exactly this himself. In fact Pope Benedict favoured the unpolarised position, of “not seeing the preconciliar liturgy as being particularly bad or harmful”, and under his influence this position has become the normal one in many places: a liturgical live-and-let-live.

What exactly is wrong with this? Fr Ruff is coy about what features of the ancient liturgy are incompatible with what teachings of the Church, or are harmful in what way. I am speculating here but am willing to hazard a couple of suggestions as to why that might be. 

One reason he might prefer not to descend into detail may be that, if he did, we would all be able to quote a great many defences of these features from the Church’s magisterium: one thinks of Trent, the condemnation of Pistoia, Pius XII's criticisms of the Liturgical Movement, and many passages of Vatican II itself. In other words, it would open up a debate about the teaching of the Church on the liturgy which he could not win.
Another reason may well be that many of the features of the older liturgy he would like to criticise are equally, or to even greater extent, present in the rites of the Eastern Churches. Communion on the tongue? Celebration facing East? A sacred liturgical language? Traditional, sacred styles of liturgical music? Ceremonies obscured behind bodies or screens? Not only did the Second Vatican Council feel no need to reject any of these things, actually demanding the preservation of some of them in the West (notably Latin and Gregorian Chant), but  the Council's Decree Orientalium Ecclesiarum actually calls for the restoration of these kinds of things, Article 6 insisting that the Eastern Churches "should take steps to return to their ancestral traditions". Was it insisting on things "bad or harmful", Fr Ruff?

Perhaps Fr Ruff and his allies fear that if they were a little more open, if the veil were lifted a little on their thinking, it would emerge that they think that the whole Church, East and West, for the whole of its recorded liturgical history, has been promoting “bad and harmful” liturgical practice. Is this what liturgical progressives say to each other when they've had a couple of drinks? It would after all only be a mild extension of the attitude of the reform-minded scholar of the 1940s, Josef Jungmann, who said that a "fog" descended to obscure the liturgy from the people in the 8th century because they could not longer understand Latin. Why stop there? The Canon of the Mass was being said silently for at least two centuries before that: an even more effective barrier to comprehension, presumably.

It was precisely this patronising attitude, that the poor benighted people got nothing out of the Mass unless and until progressive clergy could fix it for them, which is condemned by Pius XII: "Who, then, would say, on account of such a prejudice, that all these Christians cannot participate in the Mass nor share its fruits?" (Mediator Dei 108).
If this is what Fr Ruff and the other think, it would put the misgivings about Vatican II on the part of some of those who like the old Mass into the shade. Do they think the Church’s 21st Ecumenical Council could have been more clearly expressed? Well, here are a bunch of people who effectively reject the other 20 -- along with all the bits of Vatican II they don't happen to like.

If Fr Ruff and his allies have some terribly clever theological position which resolves all these difficulties, it would be a service to the Church for them to share it with the rest of us. I mean this in all seriousness. Liturgical traditionalists have been asking to see these arguments for fifty years. Stop gesturing vaguely towards "inculturation" and "all the rest": tell us what exactly is so bad about the Old Mass, and why? What possible argument could be made against it which would not up-end the infallibility of the Ordinary Magisterium, or, more simply, the credibility of the Church as an authority in the spiritual life?

Neither Vatican II nor the post-Concilar Popes, including Pope Francis, claim that the older liturgy was “harmful”. The idea is ludicrous. Paul VI, John Paul II, and Pope Francis have all praised it, not just Pope Benedict: Pope Francis waxed quite lyrical about how "we in the West" have "lost the sense of adoration" due to the liturgical reform, in an interview in 2013. I give all the quotations in my contribution to Peter Kwasnieski's  From Benedict’s Peace to Francis’ War.

These Popes also contradict Fr Ruff’s astonishing claim that the problem of liturgical abuses has gone away since the 1970s. Fr Ruff clearly lives a sheltered life. Out here in the real world you could play bingo with all the things condemned by Redemptionis Sacramentum in the typical parish. There goes the celebrant leaving the sanctuary to give the sign of peace! (RS 72) I've got routine use of Eucharistic Ministers! (RS 88) Ooh let's see if they have self-intinction! (RS 104) The fact is, abuses are now so embedded that we all know it is pointless to complain about them. All the same, Pope Francis still protests, making his own the statement of Pope Benedict, in the Letter accompanying Traditionis Custodes:
In common with Benedict XVI, I deplore the fact that “in many places the prescriptions of the new Missal are not observed in celebration, but indeed come to be interpreted as an authorization for or even a requirement of creativity, which leads to almost unbearable distortions.”
Does Fr Ruff think Pope Francis is being insincere here? Now that would be an interesting claim.
Fr Ruff’s article takes its start from one by Prof Massimo Faggioli, which criticises the book I just mentioned, From Benedict’s Peace to Francis’ War. The only conclusion on can draw from these articles is that this book’s title is apt. It was not adherents of the “antecedent liturgy” who shattered the peace brought about by Pope Benedict’s relaxed attitude—a peace attested to by many bishops when asked for their views by the Holy See last year. Still less was it the people in the middle, who couldn’t see what was wrong with the older form. No: it was a group of liturgical extremists from the “progressive” side. They felt they were losing the peace, so they wanted to start a war. In light of the paucity of their arguments, they may not win that either.

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21/11/2021 - 10:00

Guild of St Clare: Sewing Retreat photos

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Last weekend was the Autumn Retreat of the Guild of St Clare. These are 'sewing retreats': with daily Mass and other devotions, and spiritual conferences from the retreat-giver each day, the participants mend vestments. This retreat took place in Douai Abbey.

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The number of man-hours which goes into some of these vestments is immense. In addition to two annual Sewing Retreats (Friday to Sunday), the Guild has a 'Vestment Mending Day' in London every two months, and occasionally one in Oxford. With all these opportunities to make progress on various sets of vestments, mostly belonging to the Latin Mass Society, worn places are patched, linings replaced, embroidery repaired, braid stitched back down, and missing items are replaced. The Latin Mass Society has been given a great many sets missing a maniple, stole, chalice veil, or burse, or (usually) some combination of these.

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The Guild accepts help from people of all levels of skill: there are always tasks to match what you can do. These occasions are also opportunities to learn new things, and the Guild also arranges training sessions with professionals and is sponsoring two students through the Royal School of Needlework Certificate Course. Both of these took part in the Retreat.

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After the repeated cancellations of the Covid epidemic it was good to be back in a face-to-face event. The next sewing retreat, which is already almost fully booked, will be 4th-6th February, in a new venue: Park Place Pastoral Centre in Hampshire: full details and booking on the LMS website. The one after that will take place 4th-6th November in the same place: booking is now open.

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20/11/2021 - 10:00

LMS Bedford Pilgrimage in Reparation for Abortion

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This took place last Saturday. We were able to have this Mass last year, but without a congregation! It was good this year to have Mass with the faithful.
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The Church of St Joseph, Bedford, is home to a special image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which has been touched to the original in Mexico. It seems an appropriate place to have an annual Mass of Reparation for Abortion. The first of these took place in response to the Irish referendum on abortion in 2018. The Mass is a Votive Mass of Our Lady of Guadalupe: the propers can be found in Missal supplements for the USA.
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The Mass this year was offered by Mgr Gordon Read, the Latin Mass Society's National Chaplain, with the assistence of Fr Gabriel Diaz as deacon and Fr Michael Cullinan as subdeacon. It was accompanied by Matthew Schellhorn and the Southwell Consort, who were excellent as always. They sang: 

Mass setting: Tomas Luis de Victoria - Missa Trahe Me Post Te
Offertory motet: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina - Ave Maria a 5
Communion motet: Juan Gutierrez de Padilla - Stabat Mater

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19/11/2021 - 10:00

Letter in the Tablet: the value of the Old Mass

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View from the choir loft at St Mary Moorfields, for the LMS' Easter Triduum 2018

I'm late with this, but I think it is worthy of a wider audience: part of a Letter in the Tablet from the 23rd October issue. All credit to them for publishing it.

Mr Wells' transformative liturgical experience sounds to me like on of the Masses organised in St Patrick's Soho Square and then in St Mary Moorfield's by Juventutem London before the lockdown, which were sponsored by the Latin Mass Society. (These continue, at the moment, in St Mary Magdalen, Wandsworth, in a slightly different format: 7pm on Fridays.) The organisers, including the then musical director Matthew Schellhorn of Cantus Magnus, should be reminded that their efforts were not without fruit.

On graduation I returned to my home parish where, for me, the post-conciliar vernacular Mass that had worked so well in the university chaplaincy seemed arid in a parish setting; perhaps the church building was too big for the new informality. Anyway, one evening I went to a Tridentine High Mass in central London, and what a difference: Gregorian chant drifting down from the gallery, the sacred ministers involved in the ritual of the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, the gentle formalised approach of the whole service. 

And that is what I crave when I go to Mass. I have no wish to split the Church or to denounce the present Pope. But I would like to worship God in the way that best leads me to him. Is that too much to ask? 

IAN WELLS 

NOTTINGHAM

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18/11/2021 - 10:00

The Winter Mass of Ages has arrived!


The Winter edition has now arrived with our members and in churches: See HERE for stockists. It can also be purchased from the LMS shop: just for the cost of postage.



Mass of Ages

 is the quarterly magazine of the Latin Mass Society. It contains reports on our many activities across the country, national and international news of Traditional Catholic events, feature articles on different aspects of traditional Faith and culture, and opinions and views on developments in the Catholic Church.



In this issue: 

• The 1971 Petition: Joseph Shaw on how the great and the good came together fifty years ago to help save the Traditional Mass 
• Sole survivor: how Vladimir Ashkenazy, the last of Marnau’s petitioners, has been honoured by the FIUV 
• Angels among us: Father David Gornell on the reality and importance of the spirit world 
• St Mary’s, Husbands Bosworth: the return of the Latin Mass to one of the great historic centres of the Catholic Faith 
• Ad Jesum per Mariam: an update on the Marian Franciscans 
• Chideock Pilgrimage: Maurice Quinn reports

Plus our regular columns, and our first ever Children's supplement.

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18/11/2021 - 10:00

Do your Christmas shopping and support the Latin Mass Society


The Latin Mass Society's online shop has continued to expand, and our offerings for Christmas are extensive: six Christmas cards based on classics of the Church's artistic patrimony (Botticelli, as in the image on the left, Giotto, etc.), Advent calendars,  Nativity sets, seasonal devotional books: a selection you might have seen in a large and well-stocked off-line Catholic bookshop before nearly all of them closed down. Plus our regular stock which contains an excellent selection of books, including ever-changing stock of second hand ones, and devotional items. Do check it out!


You can also support the LMS or other charities when you shop elsewhere on the internet: don't let online retailers' donations go to waste!

The first is through Amazon: the Latin Mass Society is one of the charities you can select for the Amazon.co.uk 'smile' scheme. They will give half of one percent of your spending to your chosen cause: essentially you will essentially be directing some of Amazon's own charitable giving from their profits to the LMS (or whoever) instead of something else of their own choosing.

The other is called 'easyfundraising'. If you visit your usual online retailers through the easyfundraising site, or using the easyfundraising app, having told easyfundraising which charity you wish to support, a great many of them will make a small donation to your charity if you buy something.

Just visit the easyfundraising site and all will be explained. The donations vary in size; some are fixed sums, some are percentages. It's not much but it adds up. If thousands of UK Catholics consistently did their shopping this way in favour of the Latin Mass Society or Aid to the Church in Need, it would raise a very real sum of money.

Don't let these pennies get frittered away: send them to something you can believe in, the LMS or something else worthwhile.

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17/11/2021 - 14:59

Response to Cardinal Cupich

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LMS Pilgrimage to Bedford (in reparation for abortion), to the 
Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Cardinal Cupich has published a defence of Traditionis Custodes in the Jesuit magazine America(An earlier article, on Pray Tell, finds a response from Matthew Hazell on Rorate Caeli here.) In this article he argues... well it is actually quite unclear what he is arguing. 

Is he suggesting the TC was a response to the failure of the SSPX to submit to the Holy See after Summorum Pontificum? In which case why are their privileges to give absolution and witness marriages in the old Rite not the target of the Holy See's restrictions, instead of the corresponding rights now denied to priests in good standing in the diocese of Rome?

Is he suggesting, instead, that the problem has been that people have been "promoting" the "antecedent liturgies"? But isn't that exactly what Pope Benedict XVI called for when saying that "it behooves us to ...to give them their proper place"?

Or is he arguing something quite different: that the very existence of an alternative form of the liturgy is a wound in the unity of the Church? In which case his complaint is less against the SSPX, or the Faithful who attend the Usus Antiquior under the bishops, but with Pope Benedict himself.

I have published a response in Catholic World Report. (America declined to let me respond.)

Cardinal Cupich begins the story with Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, in “the early 1970s”. It is worth noting that by the time the SSPX became headline news, with its canonical suppression in 1975 and unauthorised ordinations in 1976, lay groups had been campaigning for the ancient Mass for more than a decade, and had achieved a symbolic, if limited, concession in Pope Paul VI’s Indult for England and Wales which was signed in November 1971, exactly fifty years ago. It was, similarly, the desire of the Faithful, not of SSPX clergy, which was recognised by Pope John Paul II’s world-wide indult of 1984, which does not mention the SSPX, and these Faithful who are again noted as a motivation for Pope Benedict’s Apostolic Letter Summorum Pontificum.

This is worth emphasizing because, although they share an attachment to the former Missal, the International Una Voce Federation (founded in 1965) and its member associations around the world, and the SSPX, are clearly distinct phenomena, and have suffered quite different fates in recent years. In 2016 Pope Francis gave priests of the SSPX special faculties to hear confessions, and in 2017 he made provision for them to officiate at marriage services. They still enjoy these privileges today. Priests serving the faithful within the structures of the Church, on the other hand, have just been forbidden to do either thing using the older books used by the SSPX in the very diocese of Rome. If Traditionis Custodes is motivated by disappointed hopes for “healing and unity” with the SSPX, it seems to have sadly mistaken its target.

Read it all there.


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13/11/2021 - 16:36

Iota Unum series continues: Dominic Sullivan, 19th November

The Iota Unum talks in London have triumphantly returned, and we are continue the series this Friday in the basement of Our Lady of the Assumption, Warwick Street. Doors open at 6:30 for the talk at 7pm; refreshments provided; £5 on the door.

Please come into the parish room via the stairs from Golden Square, rather than through the church. So the address is that the of the Presbytery: 24 Golden Square, London W1F 9JR

This month Dominic Sullivan, Head of Classics at the London Oratory School, is giving a talk entitled 'Spanish Intergrism and the Lesser Evil'.

The pic isn't Dominic Sullivan, however, but Tomas de Torquemada.
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11/11/2021 - 18:19

Remembering the Agatha Christie Petition

High Mass in the Chapel of the Throne, St Peters, for the Summorum Pontificum Pilgrimage 2021.
The celebrant was Mgr Patrick Descourtieux. Photo by Edward Pentin

My latest in the Voice of the Family bulletin. Here I address the objection that the beauty of the liturgy and the music and so on are irrelevant to the real value of the liturgy.

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Almost exactly fifty years ago, 5th November 1971, the reformer of the Catholic liturgy, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, wrote to John Cardinal Heenan, informing him of the terms of an “indult”, permission, for the continued public celebration of the older Catholic liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, with the agreement of the local bishop. The reformed Mass had been in place for less than a year, and Catholics had been warned that the older Missal would become illicit at the end of the calendar year, except for private celebrations by older priests. Although the indult was applicable only to England and Wales, Bugnini was denied the complete victory of the reform he had wanted to see. In 1984 another indult for the Old Mass was signed, by Pope John Paul II, which extended permission for the Vetus Ordo to the whole world.

Paul VI believed that the reformed Mass was theologically accurate and rich, and he had high hopes that it would be pastorally effective. One argument which retained the power to move him was historical and cultural. Pope Paul had indeed indicated that he understood such arguments, speaking of the “expressive sacrality” of Latin and the “regret” which faithful Catholics might feel in the change. Heenan, who had attended the canonisation of the Forty Martyrs just days before his meeting with the Pope – forty men and women who had literally died for the Mass – was able to show Pope Paul a petition showing an astounding number of figures of the highest culture begging him to preserve something which, as the petition text expressed it, “belongs to universal culture”.

Read it all there.
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09/11/2021 - 19:51

Vicar General of Rome attempts to ban the use of the 1962 Rituale Romanum

Cross-posted from Rorate Caeli.
Another document has come into the public domain, on Rorate Caeli, this time a letter from the Vicar General of Rome, Angelo, Cardinal de Donatis, implementing Traditionis Custodes, sent to the priests of Rome.

Much of it simply confirms the churches in Rome where the Traditional Mass can be celebrated. The strange bit is the third paragraph.
The motu proprio establishes that the “liturgical books promulgated by the Holy Pontiffs Paul VI and John Paul II, in conformity with the decrees of the Second Vatican Council, are the sole expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite” (art. 1, Traditionis Custodes) and that therefore it is no longer possible to use the Roman Ritual and the other liturgical books of the “ancient rite” for the celebration of sacraments and sacramentals (e.g., the Ritual for the reconciliation of penitents according to the ancient form). The use of the other Ordines, therefore, is currently expressly forbidden and only the use of the Missale Romanum of 1962 remains permitted.
There is no further explanation or argumentative support for this assertion in the letter.
Traditionis Custodes (TC) Article 1 says just this:

The liturgical books promulgated by Saint Paul VI and Saint John Paul II, in conformity with the decrees of Vatican Council II, are the only expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite.

As I have noted before, it is not easy to establish what TC Article 1 means. Nevertheless, I would make four points about its implications: noting that this is my personal view, about which I have not had long to reflect.
1. TC Art. 1 cannot be understood to mean that it is illicit to use the 1962 books as a whole, since the following articles go on to regulate the use of the 1962 Missale Romanum. It says nothing about the Rituale Romanum. To claim that this article "expressly forbids" the use of the older Rituale is therefore very strange.

2. It is even more strange when we consider the canonical principle governing the interpretation of law set out in Canon 18:
Laws which establish a penalty, restrict the free exercise of rights, or contain an exception from the law are subject to strict interpretation.
This means that unless a prohibition is indeed "express", it should not be inferred. What is not clearly forbidden is permitted. 
3. If it did mean that all liturgical books apart from those published under Popes Paul VI and John Paul II are prohibited, it would include in its prohibition liturgical books published under Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis. These include Divine Worship, the Missal of the Ordinariate, which was promulgated by Pope Francis in 2015, which as people have been pointing out, describes itself as "clearly and recognizably an expression of the Roman Rite" (Rubrical Directory, n. 6). It would also include other things like the 2020 Lectionary approved by various English-speaking Bishops' Conferences, and other things, not to mention the books, including the English translation of 2011, approved under Pope Benedict.
Clearly these are not the target of the Traditionis Custodes. The reason I mention them is that this shows that TC Article 1 has to be read in a more restricted sense than is being proposed by Cardinal de Donatis. If Pope Francis had wanted to say that all other books, or for that matter just some of them, were forbidden, then he would surely have said so.
4. In 2007, as we all know, Pope Benedict XVI made the following assertion in a legally-binding text, Summorum Pontificum Article 1:

It is therefore permitted to celebrate the Sacrifice of the Mass following the typical edition of the Roman Missal, which was promulgated by Blessed John XXIII in 1962 and never abrogated, as an extraordinary form of the Church’s Liturgy. The conditions for the use of this Missal laid down by the previous documents Quattuor Abhinc Annos and Ecclesia Dei are now replaced as follows: ...

What this is means is that, as Archbishop Roche expressed it in his letter to Cardinal Nichols, the former Missal is "regulated not suppressed". That was true under Summorum Pontificum, and it remains true today.
And what is true of the Missal must be true of the Rituale. No further regulation of the Rituale is attempted in Traditionis Custodes. Yes, Traditionis Custodes abrogates whatever conflicts with it (Article 8): but it does not abrogate what does not conflict with it, and this includes the use of the older Rituale.

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